There is a long and sordid relationship between National governments and developers. Just how many favours have National done for developers over the years? Are the so-called ‘Roads of National Significance’, especially the Holiday Highway, just a continuation of this practice? Is it any coincidence that Nicky Hager’s Hollow Men are all Shore Boys?
Te Tai Poutini Polytechnic is receiving an additional $750 million funding from Minister Steven Joyce after changing its name to the South Western Motorway.
National thinks more roads will fix the economy. Problem is: traffic volumes are falling. It’s called Peak Oil. Means they can’t come up with any projects that make sense. Puhoi to Wellsford would cost $1 for every 80 cents of benefit. The next 4 National wants to add to the build list will be even more worthless. Their solution? Weaken the rules.
Joyce was told that building the new train cars at the Kiwirail workshop in Dunedin would bring half a billion into the economy. Joyce insisted Kiwirail go with the ‘cheapest’ option. China. Now, another 40 jobs have been axed. Not to mention other economic losses. Joyce is unrepentant. Blind to the cost of ‘cheap’. Aussie’s do it smarter than Joyce.
The Greens and environmentalists have been talking about peak oil forever. Now, the IEA and IMF have joined them in warning that governments need to act immediately. Labour has pledged to cancel one of National’s white elephant motorways but that must only be the beginning. Meanwhile, the Nats are planning more ‘Roads of National Significance’.
National are not acting in accordance with Auckland’s wishes. Aucklanders want public transport, and its Council wants a quality compact sustainable eco-city – National seem to be aiming to frustrate that. Aucklanders should submit their views to strengthen our voice against the government.
Following two years of unsustainable tax cuts and economic mismanagement, National appears certain to rebalance the books with spending cuts. But what will they choose to cut? George.com asks: ‘how about the $4.2 billion in roading projects that will return, at best, just $3 billion of benefits?’
Even considering putting in a new harbor crossing without heavy rail that hooks into our existing public transport rail system is simply ideological stupidity by National. Well it is good to see that Aucklanders recognize the critical requirement for a new harbor crossing – “Rail crossing wins big backing in poll”. The sample is small but quite clear…
MartyG raises some very important points in his latest post here. Transport is Auckland’s biggest issue right now. By dying in a ditch over roads with only 18 per cent support for not having rail to the Shore and 79 per cent for, NACT would hand Auckland to a re-energised opposition on a plate.
Last year, the New Zealand Institute lambasted the Nats’ ‘aspiration’ to catch Australia by 2025 with a report entitled ‘A goal is not a strategy‘. Did the Nats change? Of course not. Yesterday, their energy strategy was released. It offers some goals but is mute on how to get there. It’s not really a strategy at all, but it serves the Nats’ purpose nonetheless.
Kiwis are voting with their feet, or rather their arses. Patronage of public transport is skyrocketing to the point of overcrowding while state highway use is falling among except for freight. You have to wonder why the government keeps building expensive highways that will be underused when public transport is full to the brim.
Steven Joyce and the NZ Transport Authority seem to be living in the 20th century. You know the time, when there was a strong causation and correlation between rising numbers of people and increased use of roads. But neither appear to have caught up with the 21st century where that isn’t happening. Yearning for the 1960’s in planning transport infrastructure doesn’t help Auckland or the rest of NZ
This post was going to be about Auckland Unleashed which is being released today, but has been somewhat, er, derailed, by the bridge vs tunnel report that’s come out.
While media speculates on how many deaths in Japan will eventually be attributable to the earthquake, the tsunami and radiation exposure, I’ll warrant that one major contributory factor to the total death toll will escape any mention or comment.
National will reject Auckland Council and Aucklanders’ view on what their future city should look like. Instead they propose One ever more sprawling city, with ever more sprawling motorways, ever more cars clogging its veins, ever less community, and ever less government money.
The few neoliberals who can bring themselves to acknowledge that peak oil is inevitable and upon us argue it’s not really a problem: ‘when prices rise, people will buy alternatives instead, like electric cars’. But peak oil causes recessions and recessions kill car sales. Even if enough electric cars could be made, could we afford to buy them?
Back to civilisation after a few days bush. First thing I see in the paper – another kid killed in a police pursuit. 20 in the last 12 months. Makes me so fucken angry. Police policy needs to change. I don’t have the answers. But these people didn’t deserve to die. 20 lives and who knows how many injured is not acceptable. Can’t be beyond us to do better. Can’t be.
In December, Dunedin City Council released its Peak Oil Vulnerability Analysis. We’re going to weather the peak oil age largely reliant on the built environment we already have in place – we can’t tear it all down and start again in time – but, the report shows there’s a lot we can do with the infrastructure we have to make it less oil-dependent.
I’ve been traveling around for Christmas/New Year’s. It hadn’t hit me until I drove about 1000kms around NZ just how much more expensive petrol has become. The extra cost is a shock when you fill up and it hurts the economy. I got wondering what the political impact is. The numbers suggest it matters a lot.
OIA papers show Key blocked lowering the drink-drive level fearing an anti-‘PC’ backlash. Officials warned “Drivers with a blood-alcohol content of [80mg], who are legally entitled to drive, are significantly impaired”. But Key’s office was worried about votes. So Joyce kicked for touch – commissioned 2 years of research. While we wait, more lives are lost.
The government’s hoping-to-be-ignored Christmas announcements continue. They’re shockingly cancelling payouts to care-giving relatives of disabled adults, diverting the dodgy PEDA funding and investigating the Auckland central rail tunnel. Look over there – there’s Santa!
3 under the radar stories yesterday. All linked by ideology. Kiwirail to buy 300 wagons from China because its cheaper than building them here. Not allowed to consider wider economic gains. Collins outsources her new prison to a multi-national with a history of prisoner abuse. English wants more ‘value’ from public assets. Value for whom? The likes of Serco?
By backing a (soft) privatisation policy, David Cunliffe is throwing away a vital point of difference with National and allowing National to move rightwards. Worse, Labour appears to be determined to give up political advantage for dumb policy: public-private partnerships and tolling have a terrible track record.
It’s official: the Auckland CBD rail loop would bring more benefit to the country for its cost than any of National’s ‘Roads of National Significance’. And that’s even before we talk about peak oil. Any rational government would put the money into the project that gets most benefit for the taxpayer buck. Not this one.
Incredibly efficient cars can be manufactured now… but they aren’t being made.
What would it take to kick-start what would be a major part of making our future sustainable?
The latest drink-drive crash has reignited the debate over the legal blood/alcohol level. It’s clear from John Key’s excuse-making on Breakfast this morning that the Nats have no intention of reducing the limit from 0.8 to 0.5. The argument that most drink-drivers have accidents when they are well over 0.8 misses the point.
Different voice, same message: instead of Stephen Joyce or John Key, we now have Bill English saying that they don’t have any money for Public Transport. Just money for roads. They’ve been forced to commit to $1.5 billion of ongoing Auckland rail projects, and that’s all it’s going to get, thank-you.
Russel Norman asked Bill English about the economic impacts of coming oil shocks and how transport infrastructure planning takes them into account. I’m not sure which was more surprising: English’s matter-of-fact acknowledgment that peak oil is coming, or his attitude that the government doesn’t need to act because the market will sort things out.
Parliament has published a research paper called The Next Oil Shock. It’s a pretty sober look at the difficulties the world is facing in producing enough oil to meet demand. The conclusions are inescapable: we can’t produce enough oil and a cycle of oil-driven recessions is coming. Are our leaders finally waking up to the impeding crisis of peak oil?
When National announced it would create an ‘Environmental Protection Agency’ and a short-cut resource consent process for projects of ‘national significance’, the implications were clear. The new agency and process would be used to override local opposition. Sure enough, that’s what’s happening with Waterview.
Transmission Gully: A road that makes no economic sense, that will now be forced through extra fast, with reduced consultation.
On Thursday, our new dictator Gerry Brownlee decreed by Order in Council that the following Acts of Parliament were amended: the Building Act, the Local Government Act, the Resource Management Act, various pieces of transport legislation, and the Civil Defence Act. Most of the changes deal with minutiae of government. Some are less innocuous.
So disappointing to see that the Auckland Regional Council didn’t even bother to respond to an offer by the designer of a personal rapid transport system to use his design to solve the woeful public transport from Auckland airport to the city. This kind of small mindedness is endemic throughout government, especially with the Nats in charge.
So National are to kick lowering the legal blood-alcohol level into the long grass by having 2 years of “research”. This whilst telling […]
An experimental solar-powered plane completed its first 24-hour test flight successfully Thursday, proof of concept that an aircraft can collect enough energy from the sun during the day to fly all night. The eventual goal is to fly it round the world…
Auckland Transport Blog saying the bleeding obvious about the aggrandizement project that appears to be Steven Joyce’s grand vision for the future of transport in Auckland. If he was concentrating on reducing the road toll on this stretch of road, there are simpler and cheaper ways than wasting taxpayers money.
